→ December 30, 2010
→ By

Put Out More Flags.

There was a young man of military age in the studio; he was due to be called up in the near future. “I don’t know what to do about it,” he said. “Of course I could always plead conscientious objections, but I haven’t got a conscience. It would be a denial of everything we’ve stood for if I said I had a conscience.”
“No, Tom, they said to comfort him. “We know you haven’t a conscience.”
“But then,” said the perplexed young man, “if I haven’t got a conscience, why in God’s name should I mind so much saying that I have?”

Evelyn Waugh may be best known for Brideshead Revisited (just $6 new at that link), but on balance I think I prefer his savage satires, from the incomparable Scoop to Decline and Fall to the book that includes the passage above, his World War II-era sendup Put Out More Flags. It’s funny and farcical but paints a very unflattering portrait of aimless upper-class twits and pseudo-intellectuals in the early years of the war.

The novel follows a small ensemble of these anti-protagonists, led by professional ne’er-do-well and scam artist Basil Seal, whose primary life goal seems to be avoiding any sort of honest career, or at least any career that would interfere with his other life goals of gadding about. His sister, Lady Sothill, has become the billeting officer for her town and is beset by three parentless children who cause mayhem and destruction with every host family. One of Basil’s temporary mistresses, Poppet Green, is an ardent communist whose poet friend, Ambrose Silk, joins the Ministry of Information and decides to put out a fascist-leaning literary magazine as a front. Basil’s more permanent mistress, Angela Lyne, is separated from her grotto-obsessed husband Cedric, who is one of several characters in his mid- to late-30s who hope to play at war to eliminate some hidden regrets they harbor about missing the last war.

One problem with satire is that it usually requires some understanding of the target to be effective, meaning that satires in general do not age well unless they either parody some fundamental aspect of human nature or simply layer the satire in so much humor that they can survive lack of familiarity with the underlying issue or institution. Waugh lampooned the England of that moment – the book was published in 1942 – but an almost Wodehousian silliness abounds, such as Basil’s tremendous idea to make money off his sister’s billeting gig, his scheme to weasel his way into one of the many intelligence offices in the British government, Ambrose’s constant paranoia, Peter Pastmaster’s desultory search for a wife, or the absurd exercises (with breaks for tea!) of Cedric’s platoons. Whether the English military or lesser aristocracy actually behaved in such irresponsible manners in the first few years of the war is beyond my ken, so I can’t speak to the effectivess of the satire, but after a slow start where Waugh introduces his cast of characters, the novel became quick and brilliantly funny. Some of the side plots seemed tacked-on, perhaps as a way to further the attack on some aspect of English life at the time, but in general if Basil Seal is on the scene, something ridiculous is afoot, and those parts are good reading.

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→ December 23, 2010
→ By

Turn, Magic Wheel.

Today’s chat transcript is up. No chat next week between the holidays.

—

“Would a woman like Effie Callingham, a fine woman like her, would she fall in love with a plain bounder?”
“Why not?” said Dennis with a shrug. “When did women ever fight over a Galahad?”

Dawn Powell has, in the last twelve months, become my favorite female American novelist, a writer whose books consistently deliver unusual and interesting characters, featuring Manhattan in its literary golden age, written with a sardonic wit male writers would be hard-pressed to match. She is the Queen of Snark, more than happy to turn her acerbic eye on her own social scene, and in Turn, Magic Wheel, she is positively savage.

Drawing its title from “The Sorceress,” a bucolic poem by Theocritus that includes the repeated line “Turn, magic wheel, draw homeward him I love,” Turn, Magic Wheel covers a group of writers, wannabe writers, publishers, and hangers-on in New York around the time that Dennis Orphen, a fictional writer who made a cameo appearance in The Wicked Pavilion, has written a fictionalized biography of his friend, Effie Callingham, long separated from her famous, Hemingway-like husband Andy Callingham, now presumed in Europe with the woman for whom he left Effie. The book is days from publication and Effie is just learning that it’s about her, too thinly disguised to fool anyone, which will put her at the center of a storm of publicity.

In addition to the phonies and schemers are the lovers, including Dennis’ married lover Corinne, whose husband, Phil, is the most oblivious cuckold imaginable, while Corinne herself is unaware she’s just a physical thing for Dennis, who comes closest to actual affection for Effie. Meanwhile, Effie is pulled to the hospital when Andy’s second wife – not that he ever divorced the first – turns up in New York with terminal cancer, having left Andy (before she knew she was ill) because he took up with a Swedish chorus girl.

Powell inserts herself more into this book than the four other novels I’ve read, through the Orphen character and through her sendup of New York publishers, including the fatuous publisher Mactweed and his ambitious associate Johnson, always fearing for his position while he tries to gauge the direction of the literary wind. Orphen is the anti-romantic chronicler of his New York life, but had to fill in some missing gaps in Effie’s history for his novel, only to find himself confronted with the real-life analogues to his fictional characters and settings:

He shouldn’t have come in here, anyway, he thought, for there was in his novel no role for Dennis Orphen; he had no business following his heroine brazenly through her own secret story. Wells wouldn’t do such a thing. Proust wouldn’t have. No decent author would step brashly, boldly into his own book.

Step he does, of course, often leaving him dissembling about his identity and connection to Effie to avoid detection as the parodist of his hosts, but also to chase Effie when she abandons him (never for long) over some slight … like turning her life into a satirical novel without asking her first.

Turn, Magic Wheel rivals her best work, A Time to Be Born, for its cynical view of love. But it’s inarguable that love can be born and die as a living organism, beyond the control of its owners, and for Powell the writer, the end of love means an honest exploration of emotional pain. When Effie hears Andy’s second wife, slightly delirious from the cancer, echo as her own Effie’s wish that she had borne Andy a son so she would still have something of him, Powell writes:

There are words that cannot be borne, suggestions so burning with anguish and despair that no heart can endure them, so Effie, her lover stolen, her dream of a son now stolen, got to her feet and motioning, speechless, that she was leaving, found her way out of the intolerable room.

I’d still suggest that anyone who has yet to read any Dawn Powell novels begin with A Time to Be Born, which is a lock for the next Klaw 100, a wicked satire that functions more completely as a novel with real narrative greed and a protagonist you can actually support (even if she’s not completely innocent herself). Turn, Magic Wheel might be too biting for some readers – although I suppose if you’re here you’re not opposed to heavy use of snark – and doesn’t have as strong of a central character, with the city perhaps the real star of the book. It is, however, more evidence of the greatness of Dawn Powell, one of the most under-read authors I’ve ever encountered.

Next up: I finished Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers (just $5.98 right now, although I should warn you I didn’t love the book) on the train yesterday, and started Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

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→ July 2, 2010
→ By

Woman in the Dark and The Wicked Pavilion.

Dashiell Hammett only wrote five novels during his lifetime – I’ve read four and have the fifth, The Dain Curse, on my shelf now – as well as 80 short stories, most of which involved either Sam Spade or The Continental Op as the detective. One of the most unusual works in his bibliography is the novella Woman in the Dark, a suspense story originally published in three parts in Liberty magazine in 1933.

Unfortunately, I’d have to say this is my least favorite Hammett work, and not just because it’s not a detective story. The plot revolves around the titular Woman, Luise Fischer, a kept woman who has fled her abusive boyfriend (Robson) and lands at the house of a man named Brazil who has some criminal activity in his past. A fight scene puts the two on the lam and eventually in hiding with another ex-con that Brazil knows while Robson manipulates the law to try to put Brazil and jail and force Luise to return to him. The conclusion required a last-minute twist and a bit of guesswork on Luise’s part, and I didn’t feel the story went anywhere. That said, bad Hammett beats good work by a lot of authors, and it features his usual crisp prose, noir settings, and characters in various degrees of corruption. It’s just more for completists; if you’re new to Hammett I’d suggest you start with his most famous work, The Maltese Falcon.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he conceded graciously. “Childhood is the happiest time, after all, so why shouldn’t she want to spend her last years in a return to that happy state?”
“I never found anything happy in childhood and neither did you,” Elsie stated pugnaciously. “I don’t think I ever saw a smile on your face till the day you were allowed to clip your own coupons.”

Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion is an ensemble novel, a rare style because it’s so difficult to pull off, but when done well – as here, or in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto – it creates an immersive atmosphere and increases the odds that the reader will identify with one or more characters or subplots.

The Wicked Pavilion revolves around the fictional New York restaurant Cafe Julien, a gathering place for the city’s artists, writers, men-about-town, and various hangers-on. Dalzell is a painter dancing around the poverty line, pining for his halcyon days with his friend Marius, another painter who found tremendous success by dying suddenly in an accident in Mexico. Elsie is the domineering dowager who tries to run the life of her young female friend Jerry, who realizes that Elsie is doing more harm than good – and might be a touch unhinged. Rick and Ellenora are the star-crossed lovers who met in Cafe Julien, and continue to meet there after long periods apart … but this time, Rick has returned from abroad and Ellenora is nowhere to be found. Everyone, to borrow a line from White Christmas, has an angle, even the side characters who populate the book’s fringes, and many of the characters only seem to be pretending to be artists or society women or intellectuals, and Powell never lets on whether her characters are ever happy or merely putting on the good face:

Rick Prescott had been leaning against the park fence watching them for a long time, thinking ruefully that of all the happy workers in the world wreckers were undoubtedly the most enthusiastic.

Rick’s observation seems to set him outside the world of happy workers, while Dalzell’s observations on other artists lay before him how much he’s sold out his art – which may not have been anything special in the first place – while Jerry ends up in the wrong bar at the wrong time and finds herself in a special prison ward for prostitutes, forcing her to contemplate her symbiotic (and destructive) relationship with Elsie.

Powell’s transitions across the three main subplots, often intertwining them by having Rick connect with Jerry at Cafe Julien or Dalzell end up with a patroness of the arts who ends up invited to a party thrown by Elsie, are smooth, and if you’re okay with insightful inner monologues, all three move along well. It’s rich, complex, satirical, witty, and rewarding. I would still suggest anyone new to Powell start with the more linear A Time to Be Born, but The Wicked Pavilion would be a great follow-up.

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→ May 28, 2010
→ By

Shades of Grey.

I did a quick chat today on my flight back from the SEC tournament, although the connection was a little sluggish and I didn’t get to as many questions as I usually do. I wrote about Drew Pomeranz and Anthony Ranaudo on Wednesday evening, and did a now-somewhat-dated first-round projection on Monday. I’ll update that projection over the weekend, and the new version should be out on Memorial Day.

—

I’m an unabashed Jasper Fforde ffan, recommending his books to friends, family members, and just about any of you who ask for a book recommendation. His original series involved the literary detective Thursday Next and was set in an alternate reality where the world inside books exists and can even interact with and be manipulated by people in our world. (Oddly enough, this reality also has Wales as an independent communist state.) The first book involves a villain who kills a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit and stops the plot of Jane Eyre in its tracks. His second series, Nursery Crimes, branched off from Thursday Next’s world, instead playing with the characters from childrens’ stories, including a menacing Gingerbread Man and the happily married Punch and Judy, who still beat the tar out of each other.

Fforde has left this literary realm for a new series, with the first book released in December after a delay of over a year. Shades of Grey has its own alternate reality, a world many centuries (perhaps over a millennium) in the future where humans have devolved (or bred) to where most people can only see a single color, and which color you see and how strongly you see it affects your social and economic standing. The society of the book is called The Collective, a socialist enterprise with a long and strict set of rules known as the Word of Munsell – a reference to Albert Henry Munsell, who devised a three-dimensional taxonomy for classifying colors. And there seems to be a chronic shortage of spoons.

Enter the protagonist, nineteen-year-old Eddie Russett, who has been sent with his color-healer father to the distant town of East Carmine as a punishment, ostensibly for a prank played on the son of a prefect in his original town, but who begins to sense that East Carmine is rife with corruption and might have even seen a murder, allegedly a thing of the past in Chromatacia. As Eddie begins to dig – while trying to avoid Jane Grey, who has a reputation for doing violence to anyone who crosses her or mentions her quite retroussé nose – he runs afoul of the Gamboge family, who wield tremendous power in East Carmine, and is also taxed in trying to maintain his half-promised engagement to Constance Oxblood, a wealthy family desperate to marry its daughter off to someone with high red perception like Eddie.

Shades of Grey is macabre, twisted, and funny, like all Fforde novels, but with a stronger undercurrent of even social criticism. Much of Chromatacia’s social structure resembles that of the old Catholic Church, from strict adherence to scripture (the aforementioned Word of Munsell) to the ruling class’ use of fear and uncertainty as a tool to keep the lower classes, particularly the laboring Greys, who are one step above slaves, oppressed. Chromatacia’s socialist system also comes in for some withering satire, as the system is inherently corrupt and open to abuse by people at all levels who shirk their duties or find ways to line their pockets outside of the official reckoning. And, of course, there are obvious parallels to racial or socioeconomic prejudices, although Fforde doesn’t overplay them, and the perceptive-versus-Grey dichotomy is muted by all of the infighting among Yellows, Reds, and Purples.

Fforde’s wordplay, a huge element in his earlier series, is still in evidence here, including the references to Munsell and the name of the test used to determine color perception – Ishihara, named for the man who devised those circles of dots used to test for color blindness. He has fun with names, delving into some obscure colors while also offering some puns and other almost-unforgivable combinations like the Grey named Zane, and he even crafts a little slang for his artificial world, such as the term used for people who abuse certain shades of green that heal pain or give pleasure when viewed – “chasing the frog.”

The great benefit of Shades of Grey for anyone new to Fforde is that it requires no foreknowledge – you’ll catch more allusions if you’re familiar with colors and a little of the science of color, but you could read this book cold and still enjoy it. The Eyre Affair and its sequels are fantastic, but if you don’t know a little about British literature, you’ll miss too many of the jokes – I ended up re-reading the book after reading Jane Eyre, and only then did I fully understand why the book’s conclusion is so funny. Even the Nursery Crimes books, starting with The Big Over Easy (starring detective Jack Spratt and … well, you probably know about his wife), need a little knowledge of nursery rhymes for maximum enjoyment. I recommend everything he’s written, but Shades of Grey gives you an opportunity to enter the demented, witty mind of Jasper Fforde without having to finish any prereq’s.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s Angels on Toast.

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→ March 10, 2010
→ By

The White Tiger.

Winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is a twisted, funny, angry book with a deadly serious core that takes aim at modern India and skewers every part of it that appears within a kilometer of the target. It is a 21st-century antidote to Horatio Alger’s novels, one where the hero is an amoral anti-hero who charms the reader while clawing his way out of poverty and into the upper class he despises and yet wants to join. Adiga presents you with the conflict of the rags-to-riches hero who gets there by being an amoral scumbag, rejecting all the traditional mores that most people hold dear (religion, marriage, culture, etc.) and arguing that he had to reject them to get where he was going.

The narrator and hero/anti-hero is Balram, known as the White Tiger, a poor boy who is determined from a young age not to remain poor and stupid and in the Darkness of rural India. He lies, cheats, and eavesdrops his way into opportunities like a job as a driver for the son of a local oligarch, one that brings him into contact with greater wealth and with the urban chaos of New Delhi. This new experience brings him greater opportunities for advancement and for stepping on or destroying people in his way until his actions eventually escalate to murder. Through this diary of his experiences, told through seven letters to the visiting Premier of China, Balram is cheerful, mocking or criticizing everyone from his idiot rich boss to the traditional Indians who remain happy stuck in the mire to the rich classes whose government and the gods to keep the teeming multitudes in penury.

White Tiger is a disingenuously quick read, with fast, witty prose, but underneath it Adiga is posing tough questions without really answering them. Was Balram a hero or an anti-hero? It’s tough to justify most of what he does in the novel, except that just about everyone he stepped on or hurt or killed had it, or at least something, coming. And who can blame someone raised in that kind of poverty and hopelessness for grabbing indiscriminately at an opportunity to escape it? Does one’s environment determine the morality of one’s actions? Does Balram feel guilty about any of his actions – hence his rationalizations – or does he believe that he’s fully justified?

Adiga’s targets are wide, but a huge portion of his satire – or just his ire – is aimed at “modern” India, which he views as segregated and corrupt, ruled by idiots who are simply smarter than the “slaves” in the country’s massive underclass. The corruption is endemic, from bribes paid to government officials to sinecures in local towns, but the characters’ mass acceptance of “how it is” is terrifying, and the one person who objects – because he has spent time in the United States – is too weak-willed to do much more than complain. The party that purports to represent the poor is every bit as corrupt as the one that rules the country for the rich, and both parties promise reforms to the masses without delivering anything.

I also read White Tiger while wondering if it was possible to write a book this funny and compelling with a moral central character. Balram simply has no moral center – he has rejected the dictums from his family, the faith of his caste (although he hasn’t given up on its superstitions), and the respect for authority that the authorities demand. He lies and acts to get what he wants, and has no compunction about his deception. A book like this almost requires a central character – or maybe just a narrator – who respects nothing and no one and is unflinching in his rejection of old institutions. Anything he does believe in, religion or tradition or family, would have to be home-brewed. If you’ve read a book that disproves this theory, I’d love to hear about it.

And, since I know someone will ask, yes, I expect The White Tiger will be on the next iteration of the Klaw 100, whenever that comes.

Next up: John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; his The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is my favorite spy novel and made both versions of the Klaw 100.

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→ March 1, 2010
→ By

Straight Man.

I’ll be on Mike & Mike on Wednesday morning at 9:40 am EST, and on ESPN Radio’s Baseball Tonight that evening in the 7 pm hour. Chats are completely up in the air until the end of spring training due to conflicts with games.

—

I don’t dislike Gracie. At least I don’t dislike her when I think about her. When I’m in one place and she’s in another. It’s when she’s near enough to backhand that backhanding her always seems like a good idea.

Hank Devereaux, the narrator and title character of Richard Russo’s brilliant
Straight Man, is a serious man wholly incapable of being serious, even when the situation calls for it. A tenured professor at a small public university in west-central Pennsylvania, Devereaux holds the temporary chairmanship of the English department (a job he doesn’t really want), believes that his brightest students “have concluded that what’s most important in all educational settings is to avoid the ridicule of the less gifted,” finds himself at the center of various family crises, and desperately needs to take a good, long piss*.

*Indeed, if talk of urination or male genitalia offends you, this may not be the book for you. I also wouldn’t recommend reading this if you’re drunk and trying not to break the seal.

Russo fills Straight Man with his standard menagerie of irresponsible men, generally responsible if somewhat inscrutable women, and small-town characters, but he aims his satirical instincts squarely at liberal-arts universities and their fatuous faculty members, including a couple of grade-A wackos in Devereaux’s department. The school is under pressure from the legislature to cut costs, an annual event, but this year a persistent rumor of a mass firing in the English department has everyone edge, with even tenured professors concerned they’re about to be let go and all members convinced that Devereaux has acceded to the demands of higher-ups by drawing up a proposed list of instructors to be cut – a fear he does nothing to dispel even though the legend is false. And he manages to escalate the issue by threatening on live (and very local) television to murder a goose if he doesn’t get a budget figure from the state by the following Monday, a spontaneous (if inspired) move that, of course, has unintended consequences.

While not quite as nuanced as his prior two novels, Straight Man is the funniest of the four Russo books I’ve read. Devereaux is sarcastic, but complex, carrying the burdens of an upbringing by two parents incapable of showing much love (one of whom, his father, eventually skipped out for an affair with a graduate student) and a daughter incapable of making responsible decisions (the one truly irresponsible woman in the book) as well as the weight of a career that went neither as far nor as well as he’d hoped. Devereaux published one book twenty years earlier and it turned out to be the only book he had in him. While that doesn’t make him a failure, it hasn’t given him the confidence of a history of success to drive him forward in his academic career or make him recognize the unusual stability of his home life. It probably has, however, prevented him from growing out of his sardonic (dare I say “snarky?”) personality, which is all the better for the reader.

The one hitch in Straight Man, a minor one at that, is the lack of a really strong female character. Hank’s wife, Lily, is a little too perfect, and spends much of the book away on a job interview, giving Hank a chance to really get himself into trouble. Hank’s secretary, Rachel, appears in every Russo book in some form – the sweet, somewhat attractive, meek woman with horrible taste in men – and his mother, an aloof, haughty woman largely devoid of maternal affectins, feels a little recycled as well. None of this detracted from the book’s humor or Russo’s compassion for his central male characters one iota. I enjoyed Straight Man on multiple levels and I’d recommend it to just about everyone.

You can also see my previous reviews of three other Russo novels – Empire Falls, Nobody’s Fool, and The Risk Pool – all of which were excellent.

Next up: Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

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→ December 13, 2009
→ By

A Time to Be Born.

Dawn Powell was a commercial failure as a novelist during her lifetime, despite accolades from her peers, including Ernest Hemingway, who called her his favorite living novelist. In fact, according to the Library of America,

At Dawn Powell’s death in 1965, nearly all of her books were out of print. Surveys of American literature failed to mention her. Among well-known critics, only Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson had ever published a lengthy and serious review of her work.

Powell died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave in New York’s Potter’s Field after a life riddled with depression, disappointment, and alcoholism. Yet her books have been on a modest thirty-year winning streak, one that the LOA credits Gore Vidal with starting in 1981.

I first heard of Dawn Powell in the introduction to Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, a book that was successful at its printing but fell out of print more than once after the author’s death. Terry Teachout compared Dundy’s legacy of mild obscurity to Powell’s, citing Powell as similar in style as well. Powell has no acknowledged magnum opus but A Time to Be Born seems to be among the critics’ favorites from her bibliography, and it did not disappoint, as it is a funny, bitter, snarky farce.

Powell chose to build the novel around a real-life power couple of the late 1930s, the Luces, Henry (founder of TIME magazine) and his wife Clare Boothe, who receives an unflattering portrayal in the scheming, selfish Amanda Keeler, who uses her feminine wiles and ability to manipulate others to overcome her humble, unhappy childhood and tear the publisher Julian Evans away from his happy marriage, launching her social career and, simultaneously, her career as a writer and pundit. Amanda’s carefully scripted life is upset, just slightly, when a childhood friend, Vicky Haven, comes to New York and receives a token job in the Evans’ publishing empire, only to find herself used by Amanda to cover up an affair while she unwittingly falls in love with her patron’s paramour.

Vicky is the sympathetic protagonist and is well-rounded, maturing as the book goes on from meek, self-effacing wallflower to determined if clumsy adult, but Amanda is the star of the show, a Becky Sharp of interwar America, batting eyelashes and working rooms, looking down on those who, if they knew her origins, would look down on her, and dominating a husband who is just as dominant on his own turf – the workplace. Amanda’s singleminded pursuit of power and the proxy for happiness it represents is understandable given her upbringing, and Powell shows us enough of this to evoke empathy in the reader until Amanda and Vicky come into inevitable conflict.

Powell’s wit is sharp, with descriptions built on backhanded compliments or outright putdowns, but even her descriptions of ordinary events show a facility with words that amuses for the length of the book:

…Ethel said, attacking her dainty squab with a savagery that might indicate the bird had pulled a knife on her first.

Where Powell shines beyond just raw wit and vitriol is her ability to see through characters and personalities right to the bone, as in her portrayal of the man who broke Vicky’s heart and sent her from her small Ohio town to New York, the shiftless Tom turner, who tries to compensate for his lack of worldliness at a dinner party with Vicky by arguing with everyone in sight:

“You’re quite wrong there, old man,” he stated disagreeably at every remark made by the other two men. He was one of those men who betray their secret frustration in this way: taken into a handsmoe mansion they fall silent, coming slowly to an indignant mental boiling point of “This should be mine!” until out of a clear sky they start to shower insults on the innocent host. Married to a plain wife they take it as a personal grievance when they meet a single beauty, and cannot forbear pecking at the beauty with criticisms of her left thumb, her necklace, her accent, as if destruction by bits will ease the outrage of not being able to have her. Unemployed, they jeer at the stupidity of an envied friend working so hard for so little pay. In the unexpected presence of an admited or celebrated person they are reminded gallingly of their own inferior qualities and humiliate themselves by inadequate sarcasm, showing clearly how impressed they are and how irrevocably inferior they know themselves to be.

A Time to Be Born is driven forward by the question of whether Amanda will get away with her schemes or whether she’ll get what’s coming to her, as well as whether the ingenue Vicky can find at least romantic happiness if not something more in the cold city. Powell’s male characters aren’t as strong or as well-built as her women outside of Amanda’s side dish Ken Saunders, and Julian Evans could have used more depth even if he was to remain an often spineless husband beneath his manipulative wife’s thumb, although his simmering revolt provides another subplot for the increasingly complex second half of the book.

Apropos of nothing, I did get a reward for slogging through Alice Adams a few weeks ago when I came across this allusion to one of the most enduring scenes in that drab book, where Alice, at a dance sans gentleman, sits in a pair of chairs on the veranda and pretends that her beau will be back at any moment:

Her agonized Alice Adams efforts to act as if she were reserving the other seat for a most distinguished but delayed escort, spoiled that evening too for her.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s long-delayed follow-up to her amazing Bel Canto, 2007’s Run.

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→ November 12, 2009
→ By

Cold Comfort Farm.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EST.

Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm is the funniest book I’ve read this year and one of the funniest I’ve ever read. It combines the dry wit of vintage Wodehouse with the social commentary of Waugh and the literary satire of Henry Fielding. It is hard to believe it was Gibbons’ first novel, written when she was just 23, when it is so note-perfect.

Cold Comfort Farm tells the story of recently orphaned Flora Poste, whose parents were scarcely part of her life anyway, and who ends up staying with some distant relations in the south of England on the farm of the book’s title. Said farm is populated by a cast of ridiculous (and ridiculously named) characters, led by the mysterious Aunt Ada Doom, who stays in her room all but two days of each year and refers ad nauseum to the time when she was a little girl and “saw something nasty in the woodshed!” Aunt Ada keeps all her relations tied to the farm, threatening to go mad if any should leave, so everyone on the farm is horribly repressed in some way – most romantically or sexually, but some in other ways.

Gibbons was parodying the romantic rural novels of the time period, most of which have been forgotten even as her novel has remained popular, with Flora herself referring to them and joking about fearing finding two cousins with names like Seth and Reuben when she gets to the farm, which, of course, turns out to be the case. Gibbons even took aim at one of the leading lights of the literary establishment: the simpering, sex-obsessed Mr. Mybug stands in for D.H. Lawrence, seeing phallic symbols everywhere he looks and, of course, falling hopelessly for Flora without any provocation on her part.

The introduction to the current edition of Cold Comfort Farm features an introduction by Lynne Truss that does an excellent job of breaking down the novel’s power to amaze even readers who aren’t familiar with the saccharine novels Gibbons was satirizing:

Flora finds at Cold Comfort Farm a group of people who have been reduced to novelistic clichés – rather like the curvy cartoon-figure Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, who famously drawled her existential plight, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”Flora helps each character out of his or her difficulties and they quickly find happiness. She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people. It’s the ultimate narrative miracle

Think of it as a precursor to Jasper Fforde*, where, instead of the protagonist ‘jumping’ into a novel, she simply lives it, and takes the stock characters she meets and gives them each a third dimension (or, in the case of Seth, simply discovers it and opens it up to the world), working as an extension of the novelist within the book.

*Gibbons even dabbles a little in Ffordian futurism (if you’ll excuse the chronological error) in the book, continuing the parallel with Fforde, setting the book about 15-20 years after the year in which it was published, mentioning video-phones and air mail and and an Anglo-Nicaraguan war in 1946.

As Flora fixes or fills out each character, Gibbons exposes the stereotypes or just flimsy drawings through humor. The ancient Adam Lambsbreath is supposed to be simple and rustic, cleaning (“clettering”) dishes with a twig, and yet Flora wins him over by treating him as more than a prop. Even the farm’s bull, Big Business, is just looking for a bit of a release, and gets it in a passage where Gibbons seems to be having fun with us by channeling her own inner Mybug/Lawrence. And when someone finally replies to Aunt Ada’s cries of “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” … well, I won’t spoil the book’s funniest line, a brilliant four-word riposte that turns the old bat’s story on its head.

Next up: Almost done with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, a book good enough that I’m holding off on the revised Klaw 100 until I finish it.

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→ October 21, 2009
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Hangover Square.

Sorry for the disappearing act, but it was a long and hectic week in Arizona. I’ll be on the Herd at 11:10 am EDT on Wednesday, and on Mile High Sports 1510 in Denver at 8:25 am MDT.

He walked through Castle Square to the sea. When he reached the sea he saw that dawn was breaking over it, dimly, bluely, feebly, amidst the torn clouds of rain. He smelt the air and felt better. He was glad he had done this. He felt like a walk. He was doing the best thing.
And then he felt a curious snap in his head.

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, part of the Bloomsbury 100, is an overlooked work from the playwright behind the movies Rope (famous for director Alfred Hitchcock’s use of long takes with disguised cuts) and Gaslight, a psychological novel of a different sort: The protagonist is suffering from what we’d now call dissociative identity disorder*, and one of his personalities wants to murder the woman his other personality loves.

*Dissociative identity disorder is, according to one theory, a reaction to childhood trauma, such as abuse, but Hamilton depicts Bone’s split personality as something he’s had from birth.

George Harvey Bone’s primary personality is the saddest of sacks, a social outcast who spends his time following a group of libertines who abuse him verbally but are all too happy to take advantage of his occasional flush periods. The group includes Netta, an aspiring actress who is neither that talented nor that driven and is primarily hoping for luck or fate to hand her a big break. Bone is in love with her – or perhaps with the idea of her – and she plays with his emotions in a cruel, sadistic manner. Bone’s secondary personality is monomaniacal in its drive to kill Netta, realizing that she is the obstacle to Bone (or his primary personality) getting on with his life.

Hamilton was criticizing the seemingly impermeable barrier between social classes in interwar England, with Netta and her friends exploiting Bone when it suits them but refusing him full entry into their social circle. (Of course, part of their disdain for Bone is what they call his “dumb moods,” when he has actually clicked over to the secondary personality.) That subtext was obvious, but I’ve read several references to Hamilton also depicting fascism through the story, and I just don’t see it. It’s a good thriller, one where Bone’s murderous desires are made a little morally ambiguous by the rotten treatment he receives at the hands of the heartless Netta, and creeping fascism does receives its mentions (through Netta’s sort-of beau, Peter), but I’m hesitant to put more metaphor into the story than Hamilton intended.

The version of Hangover Square currently in print is full of unfortunate typos, and I’m not sure whether they’re from the original text or just sloppy editing by the new publisher. Some errors were unintentionally funny, like roadside “sinposts” (I assume you find those on the Highway to Hell) or, after a phone has been ringing for a while, “at last there was an answering dick,” without actually explaining who the dick was. (Sam Spade, perhaps? Philip Marlowe?)

Next up: I finished The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread while in Arizona; is anyone still reading it, or should I post a writeup with some discussion questions for those who already did? I’ve since moved on to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

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→ May 2, 2009
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First Among Sequels.

I’ve said many times that i’m a huge Jasper Fforde fan, but I tend to save his books for long flights because they make the time pass so much more quickly. I’d been saving the fifth Thursday Next novel (technically the sixth, but The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco is no longer available) First Among Sequels for over a year and finally tackled it this week, knocking it off in about four hours of active reading time. Fforde, after saying he was done with Thursday Next and banging out a Nursery Crimes novel, is back in top form.

First is, as the title implies, the beginning of a second tetralogy involving Thursday Next, the literary detective who has the ability to jump from our world to BookWorld, the parallel universe of books – all books, in fact, organized in clusters like galaxies in our universe. Fforde has expanded the range of subjects he’s either satirizing or borrowing, including international politics, global warming (England has a “stupidity surplus,” and one proposal is to buy offsets in particularly stupidly-run countries), reality television, tax policy, and astrophysics. At the same time, he continues to show and even improve on the breadth of books folded into his novel, with a meeting in a tea room from Summer Lightning, an escape through the core containment center (that’ll make sense when you read it) of Cold Comfort Farm, a potentially fatal change to an Agatha Christie novel, and conversation with two crickets (one the main cricket, the other his stunt double) from Pinocchio. Thursday takes on a trainee Jurisfiction agent and has to deal with corruption (as usual) in both BookWorld and in England. And there’s some carpeting to be done as well.

There is, however, a more serious streak to First than there was in any of his six prior books in this and the Nursery Crimes series. Fforde’s alternate-history timeline starts to mirror ours in an uncomfortable way, with declining book readership caused by shrinking reader attention spans and the concomitant rise of increasingly inane reality television shows. (The always popular Name That Fruit looks intellectual by comparison.) He also uses the emotional connections we develop with books and with characters to underpin a key plot twist, thus advancing an argument that books provide us with an experience that is hard, if not impossible, to achieve through other means.

Oh, and various entities try to kill Thursday throughout the book, and one of those plot lines isn’t resolved and (I imagine) will roll through the next three books in the series.

First is a glorious jumble of plot lines and twists with the usual mixture of literary rumor, bad puns (such as the researcher Anne Wirthlass), and snark (Harry Potter’s name comes up in one of the better gags). If you haven’t read any of the series before, go back to The Eyre Affair to start – and really, before you do that, you should probably take a spin through Jane Eyre (or, at worst, just rent one of the many film adaptations), since knowing that plot will make the key twist in Fforde’s book about eight times funnier.

Next up: I’m reading a collection of Chekhov’s short stories while also listening to an audio version of The Reader.

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